Today BL, raid 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, back then they raided 5 hours, 5 days a week.

How people forget this, the top guilds of today, did not raid 15 hours a day back then.

I like how people just keep pulling numbers like this out of nowhere and with no proof. Especially considering this particular statement is completely false. I raided in Team Ice for a while (same server as Blood Legion) and I assure you, there were times that they were still online at 2AM raiding alongside us. They definitely would raid more than 5 hours during progression raids (most good guilds would always keep going if they felt close and people didn't HAVE to leave).

Depends on number checks, duh. Mechanically today encounters are far more demanding than they ever been in vanilla or TBC.
Considering TBC stat ramp wasn't actually this steep from full Tier 6 to Sunwell sunmote gear, guilds like Paragon could clear it in 1 reset no problems.
Plus there was just 1 raid size. God, this world first 10/25 gets old after 5 tiers of same shit.

With the truth? because what he says is relatively true. Player skill and knowledge about the game and mechanics has increased substantially since BC. Boss encounters have gotten much more complex as well.

This thread is so full of people who never killed pre-nerf M'uru. It was impossible without having the gear from a few resets of SWP farming. The numbers would never add up without SWP gear and anyone doing it at that time would realize this.

Also, top end raiders of burning crusade was every bit so much skilled as today's raiders. 3 expansions has not changed that a bit, they just taught raiders new boss mechanics.

if anything, the tools we have today have made a lot of regular people less aware. i don't think the top guilds have changed much, i think the "good" guilds are a lot better though and i think the lowest common denominator is worse than ever

---------- Post added 2013-03-25 at 05:48 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Brakthir

With the truth? because what he says is relatively true. Player skill and knowledge about the game and mechanics has increased substantially since BC. Boss encounters have gotten much more complex as well.

boss encounters are more complex but gear checks aren't as tight
top players avoid shit just fine, it's not a factor, but BC wasn't tuned so everyone could get it down, it was tuned to require 99% of the best of everything to get it down. you could not get it until you reached a certain gear level and that gear level USUALLY required a LOT of gear from the bosses you have already beaten

Keep in mind that there were no heroic modes back then. That meant that every encounter was tuned to be defeated by average to slightly above average raiders. The main method of curving difficulty was through gear. That meant that at the start of SWP, you could not afford a single mistake, or you wiped. I remember that as a healing priest you literally could not miss a GCD of CoH on certain fights or people would die. The tight tuning was, of course, partly due to the gating. As someone said earlier, pre-nerf M'uru was next to impossible without significant SWP-level gear on people.

That being said, "guilds of today" are on a whole different level. Heroic fights have taught people to deal with complex, demanding, and unforgiving encounters to the extreme. I can only speak to myself and observe just how much better I play now than back then. I was basically a scrub, with poor knowledge and control, and so was everyone else in my guild; we still ranked top100 in the world during SWP. At the level the top players play at right now, they would have completely destroyed SWP, gear or no gear.

It was only with Ulduar that encounters really became difficult to a point where they actually demanded extreme performances. For me, the Yogg-0 first kill remains one of the most spectacular WoW-achievements of all times, due to the downright insane amount of coordination and flawless execution it required. It is perhaps the best example of the "new WoW raiding" that came with the introduction of hardmodes, and the change that players at the bleeding edge of the game went through. The fights from TBC are just not complex enough to be a challenge to people accustomed to the fights we have seen since.

- 3 glaive rogues and one with mainhand, 2 of which were poached with a complete set (and therefore were by default complete assholes) and I was the only one who actually got the set on the server.
- I was so bored of wiping in phase 1 that I would just chat to people while my energy was regening.
- Didn't flask because I had to pop a demonslayer pot going into phase 2 anyway
- After countless low percentage wipes in phase 2, would still spend hours on phase 1 trying to get the perfect transition for our awesome shadowpriest in charge of MDing to then panic and insta wipe us.
- Dad would plug my internet at 2am because I had school the next day.

We still somehow got a top 10 kill. Those were the days man. I was such a shit kid and the only reason people put up with me was because I had glaives and topped meters.

The people saying that the fights have increased in complexity, but are overall less tight are undeniably right. Mostly because of the vanilla and tbc mechanics of tanks getting globalled, having to fight tooth and nail for aggro and consequentially dps having to control their aggro. I have never shat as many bricks in all these years of WoW as when I was playing a lock in SSC and would risk pulling aggro from a single dot tick on hydross and leotheras phase changes.

Reasoning?
There was plenty of time the top guilds to gear up to their best potential back then. There was a 10 month window between the release of SWP and previous tier raids.

The changes that the game went through all those years affected the game in more than one ways.

Sure fights look more complicated today, but also classes have more tools to deal with the extra complexity.
I am certain that people of TBC time had the skill to master the extra tools and the perception to ogranize a viable strategy for current encounters at least as well as modern raiding teams do.

Another thing that is different today is the preparation.
More layers of gear per tier, and it is very crucial for guilds to maximize their gains from normal modes the first week they re out, plus to do LFR as soon as available and also to upgrade items from previous tier, because it is sure as hell that 1 reset normal mode + LFR wont replace all your previous tier gear.
Back then there was only one mode. And if you were stuck at a boss you couldnt swap to normal last night before reset and get gear that would help you in the next week.
As a sideffect, i believe that top end guilds today are better organized than in the past, but not better skillwise. Only to think about how many big names are not raiding anymore it makes me feel dizzy. (Ensidia, Premonition, For the Horde and countless others).

In fact 28/100 top guilds from the era of ICC 25 are still alive as 25s.

Just do the math how many skilled people are not around to play the game anymore.

You people don't have the slightest clue as to how tightly tuned M'uru 1.0 was.

I don't know where that guy got the 45 hours worth of progression for SK to down it...but keep in mind they were the only guild in the world to do so. On top of that, they had more than a month's worth of Sunwell farm gear due to gating. Like I mentioned before, Kalecgos, Felmyst, and Brutallus were dead five weeks prior to M'uru...and the Twins were dead two or three weeks prior to the release of M'uru. That is a lot of gear, ladies and gentlemen.

The skill difference between SK of old and Method / Blood Legion / Paragon of today is minimal, especially on a raw throughput fight like M'uru. They still would stack resto shaman, everyone would be a LWer (if you don't know why, don't be posting in this thread), and they would NOT kill M'uru 1.0 without a miraculous amount of Warglaives (even then, I'm not sure if it could be done with 6 rogues in the raid, even if they all had glaives). It would have been mathematically impossible without the extra Sunwell gear.

You realise that's likely because M'uru was simply overtuned. Skill has nothing to do with that.

And they'd probably alt-funnel and poach until every player who could equip them had Warglaives lol.

Basically, if a modern progression guild can't down it in a week it's broken.

---------- Post added 2013-03-26 at 12:52 AM ----------

Originally Posted by blackyfrost

1 of "today's guilds" got h25m LK down pre-nerf

There was no "nerf" in ICC, there was a stacking buff. And IIRC HM25 LK was defeated at the first application of the buff, 5%.

I voted yes. Since the amount of people you could let fail and still kill a boss was riddiculous, nowadays there is no room for almost a single fuck up on heroic raiding. The combat awareness has grow a lot since TBC/Vanilla. The average "skill lets say" in raiding style is higher.

Absolutely. Gear funneling wasn't as prevalent then as it is now, and guilds would have been BIS going into. Also, they would have much better rosters. The reason SK did so well was because they had a tight roster with every spec and class they needed.

I don't think people realize that some encounter's mechanics were actually pretty tricky back then. I think most people only saw Sunwell at level 80 and streamrolled it, sure, then they are all tank and spank fights. But I think that fights like Kalcgos, Eredar Twins, Mur'u and Kil'Jaeden required quite a lot of coordination and work to get right. Sorry, but I don't see that many fights in today's raids that require that level of coordination.

I do however agree that most people have gotten better to the game, most because of experience, but I don't think that you could steamroll Sunwell in 1 week, with the conditions you had back then.

If the raid was released like it was the latest content today, definitely. Guilds today have much more resources and options to get the right information about bosses than back then. Nowadays, they can hit the PTR and raid most of the new raid (if not all of it), and look up data mined info about a boss' health, damage, abilities, etc. Plus, they can prepare by putting together a good raiding composition (this aspect was a nightmare back in TBC and that was especially true in Sunwell Plateau), and making sure their alts are 100% ready for the latest raid if some of their tactics don't work.

The game is simply giving raiders more resources than TBC ever allowed them to and the raiders themselves have been doing super competitive world first kills for years, now. I would be honestly surprised if they somehow managed to get stuck longer than they do today, especially when the bosses they fight just keep getting more and more complex.